Student profilesAn Olympic swimmer, a future forester
who grows tomatoes, a former gang member
who hopes to practice environmental law ...
Meet some of the students at camp this
summer. Flash
presentation

Plumas County voices A
forest-fire expert,
a timber operator, members of the Maidu tribe.... Local
leaders discuss issues facing rural communities. Flash
presentation

PLUMAS NATIONAL FOREST — It
was 90 years ago that four University of California
students set out to learn forest science from a tent
encampment in the northeastern Sierra, eight miles
outside the town of Quincy. "Arrived in Meadow
Valley and found … the four boys all incapacitated
because of sunburned feet which they got fishing
from a raft at Silver Lake," wrote Woodbridge Metcalf,
an instructor with
UC's fledgling forestry program, in his diary on July 5, 1917. Only half the
class finished the program. A war was on and two students left
at midsummer to join the Army.

Initial attrition notwithstanding, the idea of learning
forestry in a forest, from soil to canopy,
was an idea with legs, as the 48 students just home
from UC Berkeley Forestry Field Camp — and
generations of Cal forestry grads before them — can
attest. Since its early years, the summer program
has been a touchstone experience for many working
in forestry, says Keith Gilless, interim dean of
Berkeley's College of Natural Resources (CNR) and
director of the field program."The list of
its former grad-student teaching assistants," he
says, "reads like a who's who of forestry in
California." Alums have gone on to prominence
in the timber industry, as well as to state and federal
land-management agencies, environmental organizations,
and academia.

The eight-week program totals 10 undergraduate units;
forestry majors (for whom it's required) typically
attend between their sophomore and junior years. "It
makes upper-division classes more tangible," and abstract concepts easier to retain, says
Gilless.
Non-majors can earn a minor in forestry by attending
camp and taking one additional offering from a prescribed
list of courses.

Classroom and field

From
its humble beginnings on the banks of Schneider Creek,
the field camp now features a large dining hall,
faculty cabins, and a rudimentary communications
infrastructure (wooden phone booth, mess-hall Wi-Fi,
a computer lab under construction). Students
room in wooden bunkhouses or more primitive two-person "shanties" that
feature screening rather than windows. Instruction
is given in a rustic one-room classroom, built in
1921 and now named for Professor Emanuel Fritz, a
major figure in California forestry (and forestry
at Cal) for most of the 20th century.

Site
of past wildfire near Antelope Lake.

"We got up in the morning, had breakfast together, went to class
in a one-room schoolhouse with an iron stove. I loved
that," says
camp alumna Gina Lopez, a forestry major. "It's
such an old facility, and dozens of classes before
me attended class in that very room."

Then, typically, students travel in vans to field
sites — to look for flora and fauna, collect
data, meet working foresters, observe the results
of varied forest-management schemes and the aftermath
of catastrophic wildfires. On one such assignment
this summer, students hunted for threatened plant
and animal species. "We never found ours," laments
Yamile Colque, whose group was assigned Mimulus
pygmaeus, a tiny monkey flower native to meadows
around Plumas County's Lake Almanor. "A lot
of the girls were really disappointed. They were
like 'We're going to find it, no matter how long
it takes!'"

Three weeks are devoted to Sierra Nevada ecology,
adding a handful of new species each day to students'
knowledge base. "Everything else would have
been impossible without that," says CNR student
Theo Slomoff, a San Francisco native to whom "every
tree looked the same" when he first landed at
camp. Learning to tell a Jeffrey pine from a Ponderosa
is empowering, and sets the stage for weeks 4 through
8, on forest management (a.k.a. silviculture), forest
measurement, and forest operations.

Stasis and change

Many
aspects of the summer curriculum have changed little
over the years. Students still spend "as much
time in the woods as possible," says Gilless. "This
is our great opportunity to get them out of doors." And
they must still learn to ID dozens of native tree
and herbaceous plant species. Mastery of traditional
surveying techniques is no longer emphasized, however.
Instead, 21st-century foresters are often called
upon to do public speaking — so students are
asked throughout the summer to present their findings
to the group.

Students (L to R) Yamile Colque,
Melissa Chun, and Sarah Ismail.

Who comes to forestry camp is evolving,
as well. It was not until 1953 that a female student
attended. Today women slightly outnumber men (and
have for at least a decade), and there's far more
ethnic diversity than in early years. Where the program
once served forestry majors exclusively, this summer's
student roster included more than 30 undergrads (and
a few grad students) from other departments under
CNR's big tent.

"One of the exciting things about CNR is that
there are these wildly divergent views," notes
Louise Fortmann, professor of natural-resource sociology
in the college's environmental science, policy and
management department. There are molecular biologists
jazzed about bioengineering as well as students dead
set against GMO "Frankenfoods," students
who aspire to careers in the timber industry and those who categorically
reject commercial tree harvesting, particularly on public land.

When
students on opposing sides of such questions engage
with each other, Fortmann says, their debates can
be ferocious, and yet useful — "if
people are actually dealing with data, and not just
saying 'I take this position; you're an idiot, or
a sinner.' " Some students have a "very
rhetorical view of the world; the phrase 'capitalist
pig' comes naturally to their lips," she notes. "We
can make lots of critiques of capitalist business.
But I say 'you shouldn't let your rhetoric outrun
your data.'"

The human dimension

By design, it's hard to leave summer field camp with
a simplistic view of forests or forestry. Abstract
notions and strict rhetoric butt up against considerations
as mundane, say, as how to finance a forest-management
measure dictated by good science. Your plan might
be stellar, but can you make it fly?

This summer CNR complicated the picture further by
including for the first time a week-long unit on
rural community issues as they relate to forestry,
led by Fortmann and her first UC Berkeley doctoral
student, Jonathan Kusel '91. Now founding director
of the Plumas County-based Sierra Institute for Community
and Environment, Kusel noted that foresters need
to know plants and animals, of course, but also to
understand the economic and social issues facing
rural communities and their residents — who
in California are not only loggers, ranchers, and
farmers but also, increasingly, urban exiles, migrant
workers, retirees, and second-home owners, among
others.

Mimulus
pygmaeus. (Steve
Schoenig photo)

To that end, students met with local leaders and
stakeholders — a timber-company owner, a county
supervisor, U.S. foresters, local Maidu tribe members, a member
of the Quincy Library Group (a renowned citizen's
group that drafted its own forest-management plan) — and
visited new housing developments along the shores
of Lake Almanor. Later, at a working meeting of a
watershed advisory group, they heard locals wrestle
with how to protect a fragile meadow being impacted
by recreational vehicles. Members of the committee
showed keen interest when Sarah Ismail — one
of those students who had hunted in vain, weeks before,
for Mimulus pygmaeus — raised her
hand to mention that the meadow under discussion
was one of the few known habitats for a threatened
species of monkey flower.

'A big family'

Those who have been to forestry camp tend to maintain
strong connections through the Cal Forestry Club,
as students, and later as California Alumni Foresters
(CAF). They keep up time-honored traditions like
the club's annual Christmas tree sale and the alumni
group's summer picnic at camp, and give generously
to an endowment fund that helps defray students'
summer expenses. "It's sort of a big family," says
Al Stangenberger, CAF's executive secretary for nearly
25 years.

What makes the place so memorable for so many is its mix of academic
instruction, hands-on field experience, and social bonding in the woods
at a formative time in students' lives. "Here you're learning even
when you're not trying. You're immersed in it," says 2007 participant
Sarah Heard. "What struck me most, and what stays with me, is the
camaraderie," says Lopez, "the sense of community among the
students and professors, even the staff, like the cooks."

Class time in the woods.

"Numerous events of note, such as great strings of fish, collections
of rattlesnakes that escape, wild animals that die, and chipped fingers
and toes, tend to repeat every few years," longtime Berkeley lecturer
Paul Casamajor wrote in Forestry Education at UC: The First 50 Years. "But
some years appear to carry a special character," he added — citing
Snowy Year (1922), Naked Camp (1927), and Mumps Camp (1937) as examples.
In that vein, 2007 may go down as the year of Knitting Camp, in honor
of a cohort of students who — guided by an experienced yarn artist
in their ranks — fashioned scarves, socks, baby blankets, even
an eye patch and a loin cloth (the latter made in haste once a contest,
with prizes, was announced for the last day of camp).

Knitters and non-knitters alike have now moved on — a
few to life after Berkeley, most to fall semester. "Life
in civilization is more of an adjustment than I'd
thought," Slomoff reported soon after his return
to campus. "The weirdest part by far is seeing
former campers in fancy clothes, showered and clean-shaven."

Hopefully, students have also gone through changes
that a comb can't touch. Gilless puts it this way:
An aspiring timber operator, say, eats breakfast
all summer next to an environmental activist. "On
campus those two students might have difficulty finding
each other and becoming friends." But life at
camp tends to shatter stereotypes, leaving many with
"a richer understanding of people who look at forests
from very different perspectives."

As it happens, he notes, respectful dialogue between
warring factions is precisely what's needed if
we're to restore our troubled and much-contested
forests.